Diary of a Theologian

Old Clothes

The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 06:00:00 +0000

It was a morning cooler than usual. Like me, she is an early riser; unlike me, she takes long walks to get there. As happens also in church, in the coffee shop we have our regular seats. We know each other’s name but don’t talk much. On this morning, as she gathered up her things to go, I noted her interesting jacket. Yes, she said; she showed me the back as well—it was covered with small embroidery, rather fancy for the Katy Trail. “I’ve had it for 30 years but mostly it just hung in my closet. Then I said to myself, When do I think I’m going to wear it? After I’m dead?” So, being very clearly alive, she is wearing it.

I had some T-shirts from 40 or 50 years ago—three of them even older than that. I had seldom worn them. They were mementos of places I had been and places my in-laws had been (as in, “they got to see the Galapagos, I got the T-shirt”). (Though I do like the T-shirt.) How many times had I moved these basically unworn garments? I can think of at least six. After the last, I decided to start wearing them. They are wearing out now, one by one being turned into rags.

What had I been waiting for? It was foolish not to enjoy them, foolish to think that they were mementos that should be eternally preserved.

On the other hand, there was great enjoyment had by my coffee shop companion as she wore that nice jacket. Had she worn it out earlier, she would have missed this current satisfaction. It was like a piece of the last century that suddenly appeared, aglow with the crisp lustre of being new while simultaneously being a gift of the past; it was like two different periods of her life being present at the same time.

Then I realized the same: when I wear that Galapagos T-shirt, I am bringing my wife’s parents back into the present moment, remembering their love of archeology and biological science while also remembering their love of a rather young son-in-law and of our fledgling children.

A guy in line at that coffee shop asked me if I had been to the Galapagos. “No,” I grinned; “my wife’s parents gave me the T-shirt.” He had lived in Ecuador and said that, while he didn’t have the T-shirt, he had seen the Galapagos. They are, to all reports, worth seeing.

But more important, I think, than traveling to visit interesting places, is the work of putting our lives together as a coherent thing. It’s so easy to think of our lives as a bunch of episodes that happen to have followed one after another, but what is it that knits our whole life together? How can each of our lives be (by God’s grace) one narrative, one story? Maybe it is good to save some things—not for ever, but for future use. We won’t use them after we’re dead! There is likely something in your closet right now that you could bring out and start wearing.

Putting the pieces of your life together is part of the work of being a pilgrim, whether you do it in Spain or in Texas or somewhere else. What is God doing with your life? What is the story that holds your life together? It’s a good question to ask.

And there might be a clue waiting for you in your closet.

Resurrection: The Gift of Home

The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 06:00:00 +0000

    It was a Wednesday evening parish supper, and short people were present, some up in arms, others toddling or darting about. Many of the tall people addressed them by name. The short people clearly felt at home in the parish hall: it was just a normal part of their lives, an ordinary thing. This church space was theirs as much as anyone else’s.
    As I write this, an old childhood memory emerges: potluck suppers at church. My brother and I got to eat whatever we wanted. We had to exhibit reasonable behavior, but we were also free to go around and sit where we wanted and also to walk into other rooms. The church was ours; we knew it; we were at home.
    I’ve seen this in several churches lately, the reappearance of short people. I call them “short people” to make a point: children are not “the future”; they are, just like everyone else, part of the church of the present. Once upon a time, my church had a children’s sermon after the Gospel. We called it “the sermon for short people.”
—
    The sense of being at home in a church is a gift that keeps on giving. As life gets complicated, as difficulties increase, it is good to have two homes. It is good to have a family where one is “at home.” It helps to have also a church home, a place where you are known by name, where you know the rooms, where you learn how to be a friend with your other friends. I have long thought that it is a shame that the Society of Friends is a particular church. Every church should know that it is a society of friends, a home base in a complicated world.
—
    As we all know sorrowfully, the complications of the world do not stay “out there”: they enter families and churches as well, not to mention our own hearts. No family is perfect, every church falls short, and every heart is pierced by sin. The resurrection of Jesus is the way God chose to give the created world back to us. The resurrection remakes the world into what God always intended it to be. Thus, God’s resurrection gifts include families and churches and hearts of flesh. Resurrection is God bringing us to home.
    How precious is the knowledge that it’s there for us: not just on Sunday, but every day; not just on this Sunday, but every Sunday of the year.
—
    The Center of the Universe. I was rescheduling something with a friend in a different time zone, which was complicated by my just assuming that of course he would know that by 3 p.m. I meant 3 p.m. Central! After it was sorted out, he noted how we naturally put ourselves at our center. An Uber driver had once told him about a question his young daughter asked: “Daddy, why do you put on the turn signal? You know which way you're going!”
    Dear reader, now you know why Dallas drivers never use turn signals. Being the center of all things, they know where they’re going.
—
    Out & About, Web-wise. I worked through some thoughts about the resurrection body and “defects” in a recent piece, “Resurrection Scars,” for the website of the Human Life Review: https://humanlifereview.com/ resurrection-scars/

To Be A Pilgrim

The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 06:00:00 +0000

The text is from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, though it was reworked skillfully by Percy Dearmer, a priest I have mentioned before. Dearmer cared about hymnody and worship in ordinary Anglican parishes. He it was who commissioned Eleanor Farjeon to write words for a hymn on creation; for her text, “Morning has broken,” we thus have Dearmer to thank as being, so to speak, the midwife.

So for “He who would valiant be.” It’s a hymn that my wife made us memorize before a happy family visit to England—about 30 years ago. (Nearly two decades later we sang it at her funeral.) Susan thus framed our England trip as a pilgrimage. The broader truth, of course, is that every human life is a pilgrimage, from God and to God; God has given us life, and the end of our life’s pilgrimage is to be with God.

Two tunes, both in The Hymnal 1982, are associated with the text. The first, #564, is St. Dunstan’s; this is the tune traditionally paired with the text in the U.S. If you are new to the hymn, this may be easier to sing (than Monk’s Gate, #565), since no syllable has to slide over two notes. I also like the dramatic climb in the second half of each stanza that finally achieves that high E before coming down to settle on a very satisfactory G. To find it on YouTube, just enter “He who would valiant be” and “St. Dunstan’s.”
—

The theme of the hymn is the valiant character of a Christian pilgrim. He stands up against “all disaster” by following Jesus with constancy. If you want to be a pilgrim—which is to say, if you want to follow Jesus in your life—you must not let anything turn you away from that, your “first,” fundamental, primary “avowed intent to be a pilgrim.”

There will be opponents. To follow Jesus is to choose not to follow the false gods that many other people follow. They will “beset him [the pilgrim] round with dismal stories.” But God will protect the pilgrim, and those who try to deflect the pilgrim from his path will confound themselves. Indeed, through trials and temptations, the pilgrim will not be weakened but instead strengthened all the more. The mockers confound only themselves; the pilgrim’s “strength the more is.” There are no foes who can stop a true pilgrim—not even giants: “he will make good his right to be a pilgrim.”

In the third (the final) stanza, the pronoun changes from “he,” the pilgrim, to “us” who are pilgrims today. It begins: “Since, Lord, thou dost defend us with thy Spirit, we know we at the end shall life inherit.” This makes clear that the pilgrim’s strength, although it is his, just as it was his “first avowed intent to be a pilgrim” and just as it was “his strength” and “his might”—although all this is truly “his,” it is the pilgrim’s only by virtue of God’s Spirit. God defends us in our pilgrim lives with his Spirit. Indeed, God’s Spirit is with us every step, and he leads us, with confidence, to our destination. At the end, we shall inherit life: the hymn doesn’t say “eternal life”; it just says “life.” The end of our pilgrimage on this earth is, plain and simple, life. Fancies will flee away! The individual pilgrim, singing this song, now says “I”: “I’ll fear not what men say, I’ll labor night and day to be a pilgrim.”
—

Perhaps you will want to memorize this with me also?

He who would valiant be ’gainst all disaster,
let him in constancy follow the Master.
There’s no discouragement
shall make him once relent
his first avowed intent to be a pilgrim.

Who so beset him round with dismal stories,
do but themselves confound, his strength the more is.
No foes shall stay his might,
though he with giants fight;
he will make good his right to be a pilgrim.

Since, Lord, thou does defend us with thy Spirit,
we know we at the end shall life inherit.
Then fancies flee away;
I’ll fear not what men say,
I’ll labor night and day to be a pilgrim.

—

Out & About. Palm Sunday, March 29, I will be preaching at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas at 9 and 11:15am.

Abide with Me

The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 06:00:00 +0000

It is said to have been Alfred North Whitehead’s favorite hymn (which, given his heterodox theology, might not be much of a commendation). Whitehead was interested in the old philosophical problem of change and continuity: How can things have identity across time while they are changing? It’s a great question—are you really the same person as the 10-year-old child you used to be? Whitehead’s instinct, perhaps, was that the answer to that old question lay somehow in the hands of God; one could say we have our identity over time only when God abides with us.

We are indeed stuck in fragmented and meaningless lives if God does not abide with us.

“Abide with me” is #662 in The Hymnal 1982. The first line juxtaposes steady abidingness and the reality of change. “Abide with me; fast falls the eventide.” It’s a prayer asking God to stick with us even though (quickly!) the day comes to an end. The image, which is natural to Christian thought, is of a human life as a single day. The poet will shortly spell out that he needs God “every passing hour.” We need God because there are many kinds of change that threaten our life. The darkness deepens. Other helpers fail and comforts flee. We are helpless, but God is precisely the “help of the helpless.”

All that from only the first stanza. The second introduces temptation, indeed, the tempter himself. Only God’s grace “can foil the tempter’s power.” Only God can be our guide through all these changes in life. Only God can be our “stay,” the still point, our secure hold while everything changes. We need God not only in trouble but also when things seem calm. We need God to abide “through” good things and bad: “Through cloud and sunshine, Lord, abide with me.”

The third stanza expresses the confidence that comes when God is with us. Fear of the foe is gone; our “ills” have no heaviness, our tears no bitterness. Then St. Paul is quoted: “Where is death’s sting? where, grave, thy victory?” This, from 1 Corinthians 15, reveals that our concern from the beginning has been death—and that death is a vanquished enemy. “I triumph still,” the poet says, “if thou abide with me.”

What is triumph at death? It is the passage from death to life. How does it happen? In the final stanza the poet asks God to keep the cross in front of his eyes as they close, that the last thing he sees in life be the sign of Jesus’ death as his promise of resurrection. After death comes sunshine: “heaven’s morning breaks”! And what, pray tell, is that morning except Easter morning! So the whole prayer can be wrapped up as a request for God to “abide with me” in life, in death, always.

The author was a clergyman who, despite fragile health, was known for cheerfulness. He preached his last sermon against his family’s urging that he stay in bed; he was known to say “better to wear out than to rust out.” Henry Francis Lyte, 1793–1847: he wrote the hymn and it was first sung at his funeral, though not to the perfect tune that we know, “Eventide,” which William Henry Monk wrote 14 years later.

—

A few years ago, as part of my campaign for memorizing prayers, I wrote about “Lord Jesus, stay with us, for evening is at hand and the day is past. . . .” That prayer, like “Abide with me,” is based on the story in Luke 24 of the two disciples inviting Jesus to turn in to their home. “Abide with me” is a fitting pair to that collect, and I am going to try to memorize it for the Camino. I invite you to join me in the memorization. (If you don’t know the tune, there are many performances on YouTube; one could do worse than start with the choir of King’s College in Cambridge.)

—

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;

the darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide:

when other helpers fail and comforts flee,

help of the helpless, O abide with me.

I need thy presence every passing hour;

what but thy grace can foil the tempter’s power?

Who, like thyself, my guide and stay can be?

Though cloud and sunshine, Lord, abide with me.

I fear no foe, with thee at hand to bless;

ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness.

Where is death’s sting? where, grave, thy victory?

I triumph still, if thou abide with me.

Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes;

shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies;

heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;

in life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

—

Out & About. This Sunday, March 22, I will be preaching at the 9:30am Eucharist at St. John’s Church in Corsicana, Texas. Then on Wednesday, March 25, I am to speak at their Lenten program. My talk is titled, “Walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain: A pilgrim's reflections.” The program starts at 6pm with a light supper.

Palm Sunday, March 29, I will be preaching at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas at 9 and 11:15am.

Pilgrim Again

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 06:00:00 +0000

As in 2022 and 2024, so this year, God willing, I will be walking the Camino Francés across northern Spain to Santiago. My route will be basically the same as before, as will be the time of year, and I have wondered if I am getting in a rut. Would it be better to make a pilgrimage to a different destination? or at least to take a different route to Santiago?

In the Middle Ages, there were three principal pilgrim destinations: Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago. In the year of our Lord 2026, walking to Jerusalem would present obvious difficulties. To walk to Rome, by contrast, would be quite possible: I know a peregrina who walked from Canterbury to Rome, about 1500 miles in total (she did it in three, 500-mile pieces, one piece every other year). Why not Rome?

Or why not get to Santiago by a different camino? There are ancient paths from Seville and Lisbon, for instance; there is also the Camino Norte that runs close to the Mediterranean. Further options are to start in France, for instance at Le Puy; that camino (about 500 miles in France) is an earlier French part of the Camino Francés that I have walked.

Nonetheless, I keep coming back to the original plan: to walk, alone, the Camino I have walked before. My decision has to do with the nature of pilgrimage. The point is not tourism. As T. S. Eliot says in his poem “Little Gidding,” about a minor pilgrimage destination in England (an old church in an out of the way place which has survived centuries and which, at one point, was the center of a family-based Christian community under Nicholas Ferrar): One does not go to such a place in order to inform curiosity or carry report back home. Instead, Eliot says, you come to such a place “to kneel Where prayer has been valid.”

This is the strange thing about pilgimage. You have a destination; you have a period of time cleared on your calendar; but you must let go of control of the details. People ask me how I will get to my starting place, and that’s something I’m still working out. (Things happen in the world and they affect pilgrims just like everyone else. In my case, it has to do with changes to Spain’s train service subsequent to a derailment and crash earlier this year.) Once you’re at the starting place, you entrust yourself to the Camino, to people you will meet who will offer food and shelter, to your fellow pilgrims. You can make reservations, though I prefer not to.

The biggest letting-go, however, is not with regard to arrangements of travel and lodging. It is letting-go of yourself into God’s hands. You start a Camino not knowing what God wants to give you. It is, precisely, a journey—not only a journey through landscapes and villages, but a journey of the soul. A few years ago I had the sense that I was accompanying Jesus through the multitude of humanity to his cross. By Camino lore, Santiago himself is a pilgrim on this route, going with us to the cathedral which, by tradition, contains the tomb that contains his mortal remains.

The ancient Greek Heraclitus said you can’t step into the same river twice. It’s the same Camino as before, but it is as open to possibility as ever.

And of course, this is true for everyone reading these words. Everyone of us is on a pilgrimage here on Earth. (This is always true, but especially this is what Lent is about, and supremely the holy week.) At the center of our lives is our letting-go of ourselves and taking the hand of Jesus, to walk with him. Where will he take us? No matter where it might be in terms of geography and lodging and bodily health, it will be into his heart, into the life of God.

—

Out & About. Wednesday, March 25, at St. John’s Church in Corsicana, Texas, I am to speak at the Lenten program. My talk is titled, “Walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain: A pilgrim's reflections.” The program starts at 6pm and includes a light supper; everything is concluded by 8.

Patience and the Dying Art

The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 06:00:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I wrote in this space about medicine and dying. Recently I wrote also for The Human Life Review about patience and the art of dying. The word “art” is deliberate: old Christian wisdom about dying is that there is an art, a craft to it. This art of dying is something we can encourage for people, and it is also something we ourselves can practice. There are particular virtues that are apposite for dying well, for dying in a way that is holy and encouraging to others.
    Traditionally, five good virtues are noted, namely, faith, hope, patience, humility, and charity. Dying persons would be encouraged to practice these things, as best they could, while they had time to do so. These goods arose to combat typical temptations that we humans face as we encounter the limits of our mortal life, temptations of doubt, despair, impatience, vainglory, and avarice.
    In my post, I focused on one of those goods, the virtue of patience. And to explicate it I turned to the Anglican bishop Jeremy Taylor, who in 1651 published The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying.
    “Taylor’s first word on patience is directed at the friends and visitors of the sick person. Don’t tell sick people to suppress their sighs, groans, humble complaints, or dolorous expressions. When you are sick you do not have the duty of being cheerful! Different people feel pain to different degrees, and one should allow a sick person to cry out when pain is severe. Indeed crying out may be helpful, in that in some cases it abates or diverts the pain. . . .
    “Christian patience does not forbid complaint but it should shape the way sick people complain. First, our complaints should be without despair. Complain you may, but do not lose hope. Why? Because God really is good, as we know already from our experience. So pray to God to help you; turn to spiritual guides; make use of ‘holy exercises and acts of grace’ that are proper to a state of sickness.
    “Second, our complaints should be ‘without murmur’! Murmuring is what the fallen angels did: they murmured against the way God had arranged things. Instead, think on God’s justice, wisdom, mercy, and grace. Confess your sins, for by doing so you increase and exercise humility. Sing God’s praises—even from the lowest abyss.
    “And third, our complaints should be without peevishness, that is to say, we should be civil and decent towards people who are ministering to us. Seek to be tractable, easy to be persuaded, apt to take counsel. Don’t be ungentle and uneasy to the ministers and nurses that attend you, and bear their accidents contentedly and without disquietude or evil words.”
    Then I listed things that, Taylor points out, people who are dying or very sick can do even in the midst of their weakened state, even if they cannot leave their bed. They can contemplate particular truths—for instance, that others have suffered worse, many of whom were weaker than we are, and some of them children. He says also that a person endures sickness only one minute at a time. Our duty to endure extends only to the present minute. “One minute at a time,” of course, is akin the AA mantra, “One day at a time.”
    Besides such contemplations, there are deeds we can perform in the midst of sickness, confident that God will provide what we need. For instance, we can make an act of thanksgiving, and we can resolve to do all that we can, as God gives us the power. And we can hold before our eyes and in our heart the example of Jesus upon the cross.
    The whole column has more detail and practical examples, and connects with what I wrote two weeks ago in this space. You can read it here: https://humanlifereview.com/patience-and-the-art-of-dying/
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    Out & About. Wednesday, March 11, at St. Augustine’s Church in Oak Cliff, Dallas, I am to speak at the Lenten program on Jesus as, basically, the culmination of all things! The program starts with Stations at 5:30pm followed by a lenten supper at 6. The program runs from 6:30 to 7:30.
    Regrets and commiserations. It is perhaps some consolation that we all go through it together, the shift from Standard Time to the falsely named Daylight Saving Time. Falsely, I say, for the sun rises and sets according to astronomical laws that defy our ability to save daylight. All we can do is rename the hours, we can’t save them! I have long thought, though, that it is unfair for the time change to occur always on a Sunday. Let it be on a fixed date—April 1, say—and let the time change happen on whatever day of the week April 1 happens to fall. That would be a true April Fools!

George Washington's Rules

The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 06:00:00 +0000

It being Washington’s birthday this last week, several folks have pointed to his “Rules of Civility” that, as a young man, he wrote into his school book. (You can find them easily by googling “Washington Rules of Civility.”) Some of his “rules” seem particularly good advice for us in our politically and socially fraught time. And some of them also seem particularly apt consequences of the teaching of Jesus. I will quote two.

Number 22: “Shew not yourself glad at the Misfortune of another though he were your enemy.” Gloating over the troubles of people on “the other side”—perhaps another sports team, perhaps a different political party, whatever—gloating is not to be done. Even when the person who is suffering misfortune is your enemy, and someone who (you judge) is worthy of public disdain, nonetheless, don’t gloat over his troubles. The Christian could ask: Did not Jesus instruct us to pray for our enemies?

Sometimes we really do have enemies, and sometimes, in our sober judgment, our enemies truly deserve to be frustrated in their designs. All this can be granted. Nonetheless, if misfortune befall them, we should not gloat. We could privately give thanks to God for frustrating the designs of the wicked. But public rejoicing, or public mocking of our now down-in-the-dumps enemy, or anything of the sort, is not good. It is not good for society as a whole, and it is not good for your own soul.

Number 23: “When you see a Crime punished, you may be inwardly Pleased; but always shew Pity to the Suffering Offender.” It is proper to be pleased that crime has been punished. For one thing, punishment means the truth has been told in public by the state, that the act in question was a crime, and that as a crime it has necessary consequences in terms of punishment. This is good for society: to be clear about what crime is, and not to allow crime to persist in its frustration of our societal purpose. Judgment always looks in two directions: backwards, to make a definitive statement about what has been done; forwards, to make it possible for our society to move on and not be thwarted by ongoing retribution.

Of being pleased, Washington says “you may”: it is permitted and fine for you to be pleased that crime has been punished. But, he goes on to say, we should not forget that the perpetrator of the crime, the offender, is a human being just like us: which is to say, he is someone worthy of pity for having fallen short. Crime is not an abstract thing whose perpetrators are like dumb robots whose elimination would be of no consequence. Every criminal still has human dignity and thus still is properly pitied for what he has done with his dignity.

Socrates said that, when you do wrong, the person you hurt the most is yourself.

And again, did not Jesus instruct us to pray for our enemies?

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I think it would be good for us to speak about people we disagree with, and people who have harmed us, with something of the restraint and wisdom of the young George Washington.

—

Out & About. This Sunday (March 1) I am to preach at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, Dallas; the services are at 9 and 11:15am. That evening at 5pm (still at St. Matthew’s), the Good Books & Good Talk seminar will discuss The Little Princesses by Marion Crawford, a memoir of her time as a governess to princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. For the seminar, church parking is in the apartments just south of the cathedral. When you exit the parking garage, the cathedral will be ahead of you on your left. Go to your right, to Garrett Hall, with the space-age glass elevator attached to its middle. Someone will be there from about 4:45 to let you in.

Wednesday, March 11, at St. Augustine’s Church in Oak Cliff, Dallas, I am to speak at the Lenten program on Jesus as, basically, the culmination of all things! The program starts at 5:30pm and includes also a lenten supper and worship.

Medicine and Dying

The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 06:00:00 +0000

This is the first of what I expect to be several occasional reflections on how we die, how we live with those who are dying, and how we might do so with greater integrity as Christian believers.

A few weeks before my wife died, the hospital told me I would need to find a nursing home for her, or arrange for her care at our own home (an apartment at Saint Thomas in New York City). I visited a few places recommended by various friends or medical folk. In each place, I tried to imagine visiting her there. Was it convenient to subways? What was nearby? (One was across the street from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.) I tried to imagine what her life would be like; I had been told that she might go on living for years in her diminished capacity. These were difficult things to imagine, and I felt it impossible to make a good decision. In the event, she had to be put back on a respirator; one morning not long later she died, having never left the hospital.

—

Nicolas Diat in his book A Time to Die recounts his visit to En-Calcat Abbey (in April 2017), a Benedictine monastery founded in 1890 in the French countryside. Its abbot, Dom David, spoke with him about the deaths of monks, Diat says, “with the intelligence of an artist and the heart of a good, sensitive, and sensible man” who has “lived through painful moments.” Dom David spoke of a significant change in how monks die. “[I]n the old days, in the monasteries, one prepared a long time for death. We said that the whole monastic life was meditatio mortis.” The role of the abbot was “to encourage the old monks to face the end of the road. Today, there is no longer any question of that. At the moment when life hangs by a thread, there is the emergency medical service, the firemen, and before the day of final departure, there are many small departures in white cars or red vans; oxygen, transfusion, antibiotics, then life resumes, for a few weeks or a few short years.”

Dom David appreciates the good that hospitals can do (he himself had been treated for coronary stenosis, which “saved me from a lot of problems”). But he sees also how medical care—“fighting” disease—can deprive monks of precious time in which their calling is to prepare for death. One of his monks, Father Patrice, was approaching his hundredth birthday when a pulmonary infection sent him to the hospital. There the doctors fought the infection and, after two months, they were successful. They sent Father Patrice home, having pronounced him cured—and he died two days later. Diat writes: “The doctors had defeated the famous bacteria they had relentlessly pursued in his lungs. But the poor man had become a weak and emaciated little fledgling.”

Medicine helps us by isolating parts of our body and focusing on curing their ailments. But obviously this cannot go on forever. To do is to treat the patient like “a machine. Surgeons repair a liver, a kidney, a heart, a stomach, until the machine is so worn-out that it has to be thrown in the trash.” Dom David says we need “to stay in touch with God, from whom we get our breath. This link cannot be broken. The doctor provides care, but it is the patient who heals . . . connected with the One who gives life.”

Death can be hard and fearful, for any of us. Diat saw, and heard about, the fears and sufferings and perplexities of many monks. “The man who consecrates his life to God can fear the end of the road. He stalls in front of the door of the brothers staying in the infirmary. The struggle exists; it is useless to hide it.” Indeed, “selfishness, cowardice, and fear of one who suffers are always lurking in a corner of our heart.” Here we face our limits, and our need to entrust ourselves to God—as we care for one another, and as we prepare for our own final breath.

—

Out & About. I am to preach at St. Matthew’s Cathedral on Sunday, March 1; the services are at 9 and 11:15am. Also at St. Matthew’s on March 1, at 5pm I will lead a discussion of The Little Princesses by Marion Crawford, who was the governess to Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret for some 17 years. The royal family, not without reason, took the publication of this book as a violation of trust, though readers have been grateful for its sympathetic insight into the girls’ education and life.

On the Web. In Shakespeare’s “Pericles,” the chaste Marina is captured by pirates and sold into a brother. Matthew Lee Anderson has an arresting account of her “realism” in the midst of a play full of magic—and the incredulity of his Baylor students concerning the attractive power of her chastity, an incredulity that underscores our cultural poverty. You can read his short essay here: https://matthewleeanderson.substack.com/p/739-chastity-and-pericles

Does God Speak to You in the Bible?

The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 06:00:00 +0000

God speaks to people who turn to him. One of the assured ways we can hear God’s voice is to read the Bible, which has been rightly called “God’s Word written.” But how might one hear God speaking through the Bible?

It begins, as so many important things do, simply with showing up. You start reading the Bible. Maybe you read a little bit each day; maybe you follow some sort of plan for reading the Bible; maybe you follow a lectionary; maybe you read a part of the Bible that a friend or priest recommended to you. The scheme you have for Bible reading doesn’t matter very much, provided it is something you are able to incorporate into your life. (It won’t do, for instance, to say you’ll read ten chapters every day, and then for you to rush through the chapters because you have this guilt about not being able to keep up. It might be better, in such a case, to be satisfied with ten verses—or even less!)

What one seeks is to make some sort of regular, probably daily, encounter with God’s Word written. We have, as it were, a guarantee that the Bible is God speaking to us. So we read the Bible, expectantly and in a sense lovingly, knowing that God preserved these words for his people to hear and treasure.

What then? Sometimes it happens that, as you are reading the Bible, you sense that God is saying something particular to you. What God is telling you may not be the exact words on the page, but they are related, they make sense. I think if I give two contrasting examples it will become clear what I mean.

You might be reading the Bible and think God is telling you to take your elderly grandfather, who is living with you, and thrust him, shivering in his pyjamas, out of your house into a snowdrift. No: God is not telling you to do that! No matter what you might have been reading, such a deed would run counter to the Ten Commandments and Jesus’ commandment to love one another. What we hear God saying to us will be consonant with his written Word.

But perhaps you’re reading one of the parables of Jesus and a situation at work comes to mind, and you feel God is telling you to make an effort to speak with someone there, someone you’ve been having a hard time with. Those particular words were not in the Bible (“Go talk with Georgette and try to overcome your dislike of her”), but they are words consonant with what is written in the Bible.

God can, of course, speak to any person at any time; it is his pleasure to be a speaking God! Nonetheless, it is a great help to us, who want to love and trust him, to open ourselves to his written Word. Through his written Word we can indeed hear his voice.

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Out & About. This Sunday, Feb. 15, I get to visit the geographical center of the diocese of Dallas: St. Phillip’s Church in Sulphur Springs, Tex. I will preach at the 11am service and then, afterwards, talk about how believing in God is the beginning of an adventure.

Upcoming book seminar: At St. Matthew’s in Dallas, Sunday, March 1, 5pm, we’ll discuss The Little Princesses by Marion Crawford, who was the governess to Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret for some 17 years. The royal family, not without reason, took the publication of this book as a violation of trust, though readers have been grateful for its sympathetic insight into the girls’ education and life.

The Eucharist Prayer as a Story

The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 06:00:00 +0000

It begins with the invitation to lift up our hearts and give thanks to God, which is why it can rightly be called the Great Thanksgiving. It then unfolds as a story masterfully told. We read it (and hear it) as a coherent story that runs from the beginning of the universe to its end, a story that catches us up with all things in giving thanks to God.

The shape of the story is like an hourglass. It begins with giving thanks in the broadest sense and it concludes with the longing that all history end in praise of God. At the opening we affirm it is “meet and right” or “right and just” for human beings to give thanks to God. We do so because he is the creator of all things. We do so also because he has given us salvation in Jesus Christ. And we do so by means of the action of the Holy Spirit. From the beginning, our thanksgiving is grounded in the Trinity. At the end the prayer wraps up everything that has been said, all the thanks and all the particular requests and desires and hopes that underlie the thanks. It turns all this—truly, all the longings of the universe—into praise of the vision of God, again identified trinitarianly. So it begins and ends with great breadth, the “everything” that God created at the beginning and the “everything” that is the substance of praise of God in the end.

In between the prayer narrows, because it is only in Jesus Christ that this prayer is possible, and Jesus is a human being with his own story. That is to say, the story of Jesus is nestled at the heart of the story of the whole universe. This leads to a further narrowing of the hourglass. First we recall the entirety of Jesus’ life as, incarnate of the Virgin Mary, he lived and died as one of us, to reconcile us to his Father. Then we narrow to his death, to the cross on which, stretching out his arms of love, he offered himself as a sacrifice for the sins of the world.

The narrowest part of the hourglass comes next. We go to the night before he died, to the intimate space of his last supper with his friends. Even that is not our ultimate focus, because we bear down upon two moments in that final meal, the moments pertaining to the bread and the wine. Here the prayer moves in for a close-up that is almost, as we say, “in real time.” He takes bread. He breaks it. He gives thanks for it. He tells what the bread—this bread—really is: “This is my body, which is given for you.” Likewise with the cup: “This is my blood of the New Covenant, shed for you and for many.” And with each comes his command: to take, to eat, to drink.

A story of such great, cosmic stretch—from the beginning of creation to the consummation of all things, which has at the middle this close-in focus on particular words over particular foods and the command given at that meal: such a story is not something to be rattled off casually or quickly. The story begins and ends big, and so should be the telling. But in the middle the voice should change, probably by slowing down a bit, probably by lowering volume a bit. In the middle it’s a “you are there” moment, going through particular actions and particular words that were done and said on that one particular night at the center of this story of everything.

I once had a priest tell me just to clip through the prayer like it was a single story. I agree that it is a single story but disagree that that means we should clip through it. This priest was opposed to the idea that something “special” happens at the words over the bread and wine; he didn’t want any special attention paid to the middle of the prayer; he wanted the whole prayer to be said crisply without variation. This was because he opposed the “western” idea that something special happens when the words “This is my body [or blood]” are spoken.

I am myself agnostic about when the transformation of the bread and the wine occurs; and nothing that I am saying requires the belief that the moment of change is at any particular place in the prayer. There are good theological arguments in favor of a variety of views. My point is not theological so much as literary. Rather than being read through crisply and without variation, the eucharistic prayer calls for a reading that brings out its inherent structure. To do so requires that we treat the special narrative, and especially the words Jesus said, differently than the rest of the prayer. A priest who does that is helping all of us take hold of the structure of the cosmic story, with its awesome pivot point in the midst of a supper with friends. And I think, moreover, to read it that way is simply good reading.

I said above that, probably, this is accomplished by a small lowering of voice and slowing of pace. But it needn’t be done that way, nor need we have uniformity. What we priests should try to convey, however, is that we believe this really is the pivot point on which the world’s history has turned.

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Out & About. This weekend, Feb. 7/8, I am to preach at All Souls’ Church in Oklahoma City; the services are at 5:30pm Sat., and on Sunday at 8 and 10am and 5pm.

Sunday, Feb. 15, I get to visit the geographical center of the diocese of Dallas: St. Phillip’s Church, Sulphur Springs, Tex. I will preach at the 11am service and then, afterwards, talk about how believing in God is the beginning of an adventure.